Optimal PMU placement for power system state estimation with random component outages

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) provide globally synchronized measurements of voltage and current phasors in real-time and at a high sampling rate. Hence, they permit improving the state estimation performance in power systems. In this paper we propose a novel method for optimal PMU placement in a power system suffering from random component outages (RCOs). In the proposed method, for a given RCO model, the optimal PMU locations are chosen to minimize the state estimation error covariance. We consider both static and dynamic state estimation. To reduce the complexity, the search for the optimal PMU locations is constrained to the set of locations guaranteeing topological observability. We present numerical results showing the application and scalability of our method using the IEEE 9-bus, 14-bus, 39-bus and 118-bus systems.

► We study optimal PMU placement for state estimation of power systems suffering from random component outages (RCOs).
► The estimation error covariance is used for optimal placement of PMUs.
► An iterative algorithm is proposed to solve this optimization problem using upper and lower bounds of the estimation error covariance.
► Simulation tests show that the algorithm is efficient for searching the optimal PMU placement solution for any RCO rate.
► The scalability of the algorithm is demonstrated on four IEEE standard test systems.